I’ve arrived in London seven or eight years ago under a scholarship from the Brazilian government. At the time, the government was sending small groups of artists abroad to study and develop their own work, and obviously those artists would be ‘disseminating’ Brazilian art and culture abroad.
After my degree show, I was invited to do a residency in Gasworks, where I stayed until today. Basically the three or four works I’m showing today are works that were done in London; it’s a small group of projects related to drawing, although I don’t think you’re going to see any traditional drawings. They are mostly sculptures or installations, but I always address the specific interest with drawing, how the drawing migrates to these other forms of works.

The ‘Banana Pieces’

We have a few examples of the drawings on bananas (‘Drawings On Bananas/Voodoo’, 2003/05), which was a work I developed after the carpet pieces. I made about 12 or 15 drawings of them (probably the images which were most in the press or which most people saw were the portrait and the voodoo drawing). I was playing some sort of anthropomorphic games. I was thinking of the fruit as a body and what kind of drawings could follow that logic: if you draw bones on those fruits, what kind of shapes would they take?
The voodoo drawing, for instance, is playing with these ideas: that bunch is a whole body with an equivalent for legs, arms, hands and the head, which is the skull at the back; on the side, again, it is playing with the idea of a female and a male body; and one could only see if the person had very good information about voodoo because they were specific on the male body or the female body, where the pins are. I’m not really interested in voodoo – I’m not into black magic – I was just appropriating the fact that those drawings were made with needles, through an oxidating process. I was very interested in how they would change over time. When you made the drawings you couldn’t see them so well and then they would get darker and darker and mix with the own ageing process of the bananas; all the brown spots would start eating the drawings that I’d just made, and at the last stage, the drawings would become white as a kind of print when all the skin of the fruit would be brown.